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What are the options to migrate data from MongoDB to Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB vCore?

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This document describes the various options to lift and shift your MongoDB workloads to Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB vCore offering.

Azure Data Studio (Offline)

The The MongoDB migration extension for Azure Data Studio is the preferred tool in migrating your MongoDB workloads to the API for MongoDB vCore.

The migration process has two phases:

  • Premigration assessment - An evaluation of your current MongoDB data estate to determine if there are any incompatibilities.
  • Migration - The migration operation using services managed by Azure.

Premigration assessment

Assessment involves finding out whether you're using the features and syntax that are supported. The purpose of this stage is to identify any incompatibilities or warnings that exist in the current MongoDB solution. You should resolve the issues found in the assessment results before moving on with the migration process.

Tip

We recommend you review the supported features and syntax in detail and perform a proof-of-concept prior to the actual migration.

Migration

Use the graphical user interface to manage the entire migration process from start to finish. The migration is launched in Azure Data Studio but runs in the cloud on Azure-managed resources.

Native MongoDB tools (Offline)

You can use the native MongoDB tools such as mongodump/mongorestore, mongoexport/mongoimport to migrate datasets offline (without replicating live changes) to Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB vCore offering.

Scenario MongoDB native tool
Move subset of database data (JSON/CSV-based) mongoexport/mongoimport
Move whole database (BSON-based) mongodump/mongorestore
  • mongoexport/mongoimport is the best pair of migration tools for migrating a subset of your MongoDB database.
    • mongoexport exports your existing data to a human-readable JSON or CSV file. mongoexport takes an argument specifying the subset of your existing data to export.
    • mongoimport opens a JSON or CSV file and inserts the content into the target database instance (Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB vCore in this case.).
    • JSON and CSV aren't a compact format; you could incur excess network charges as mongoimport sends data to Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB vCore.
  • mongodump/mongorestore is the best pair of migration tools for migrating your entire MongoDB database. The compact BSON format makes more efficient use of network resources as the data is inserted into Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB vCore.
    • mongodump exports your existing data as a BSON file.
    • mongorestore imports your BSON file dump into Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB vCore.

Note

The MongoDB native tools can move data only as fast as the host hardware allows.

Data migration using Azure Databricks (Offline/Online)

Migrating using Azure Databricks offers full control of the migration rate and data transformation. This method can also support large datasets that are in TBs in size.

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